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Theodore Dalrymple Quotes
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Anthony Malcolm Daniels , who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is an English writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the east end of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.

Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin. He is the author of a number of books, including Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, Our Culture, What's Left of It, and Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality.

In his writing, Daniels frequently argues that the socially liberal and progressive views prevalent within Western intellectual circles minimise the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and undermine traditional mores, contributing to the formation within prosperous countries of an underclass afflicted by endemic violence, criminality, sexually transmitted diseases, welfare dependency, and drug abuse. Much of Dalrymple's writing is based on his experience of working with criminals and the mentally ill.

Daniels has been described as a pessimist. In 2010, Daniel Hannan wrote that Dalrymple's work "takes pessimism about human nature to a new level. Yet its tone is never patronising, shrill or hectoring. Once you get past the initial shock of reading about battered wives, petty crooks and junkies from a non-Left perspective, you find humanity and pathos".

In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!.

✵ 11. October 1949
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Theodore Dalrymple: 96   quotes 3   likes

Theodore Dalrymple Quotes

“Never has so much indifference masqueraded as so much compassion; never has there been such willful blindness. The once pragmatic English have become a nation of sleepwalkers.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Seeing Is Not Believing.
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Indifference

“The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man’s existence.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Exposing Shallowness http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/demello-dalrymple-2647 (June 2000).
New Criterion (2000 - 2005)

Tattoo

“We are like creatures so dazzled with our own technological prowess that we no longer think it necessary to consider the obvious.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Modern Predestination http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-02-06td.html (February 6, 2007).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Thinking

“Whereas fortitude was once regarded as a virtue, it has come to be regarded as a kind of reprehensible and deliberate obtuseness, to be utterly condemned as treason to the self (there is no fury like a non-judgmentalist scorned).”

Theodore Dalrymple

Bad counsel http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/jun05/therap.htm (June 2005).
New Criterion (2000 - 2005)

“It is easy to be lenient at other people's expense, and call it generosity of mind.”

Theodore Dalrymple

It is right to imprison drug addicts - argues Theodore Dalrymple http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001744.php (March 18, 2008).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

People

“Henceforth, virtue was not the exercise of discipline, self-control or benevolence for the sake of others, but the expression of the right opinions of the moment.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Good people have become a defeated class in Blair's Britain, argues Theodore Dalrymple http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001464.php (March 29, 2007).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

Exercises

“Blanket compassion will shift the distribution decisively towards the manipulative end of the spectrum, and may paradoxically decrease the compassion with which the genuinely despairing are treated: for they are apt to get lost in the great mass of pseudo-distress and manipulation, and often their conduct draws less attention precisely because it is less attention-seeking.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple on Terence Rattigan, Suicide and Prison - or how incontinent compassion has become a Keynesian stimulus to the economy of the caring profession http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001768.php (April 18, 2008).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

Decision , Drawing , Despair

“If a lack of money had prevented people from improving their lot, then mankind would still be living in the caves: unless you believe that investment capital first arrived from outer space.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple remembers Ken Saro-Wiwa - and asks, if unearned income from oil has done so much harm to Nigeria, will increased unearned aid flows not do similar harm to Africa as a whole? http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000708.php (January 3, 2006).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

Money , People

“Wisdom and good governance require more than the consistent application of abstract principles.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (2006)

Wisdom

“The withdrawal symptoms from opiates are not severe and never dangerous, though of course they do exist. Insofar as they are genuinely feared, there has been a campaign of exaggeration about them for nearly 200 years.”

Theodore Dalrymple

C-SPAN: Romancing Opiates https://www.c-span.org/video/?191384-1/romancing-opiates (May 30, 2006)

Fear

“His greatest fear, or nightmare, is not to be thought hip or cool, and if to avoid that terrible fate it means that he has to glamorize evil--well, so be it.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (2006)

Fate , Fear , Evil

“Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy.”

Theodore Dalrymple

What the New Atheists Don't See http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2007).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“There is no smoke without fire, and there is no ethically repugnant principle without logic.”

Theodore Dalrymple

How to murder a Bolivian boy http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/19/jun01/daniels.htm (June 2001).
New Criterion (2000 - 2005)

“In the British public service nothing succeeds like failure: indeed, failure is success, if looked on in the right way, namely as something requiring yet further intervention in people's lives to amend.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Mr Brown's self-esteem issue - or, asks Theodore Dalrymple, does Gordon Brown really believe that he can solve the problems of the world.
Source: The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

People , Way , Failure , Success

“There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (2006)

People , Happiness

“Incidentally, many thousands of American servicemen addicted themselves to heroin in Vietnam, but two years after their repatriation their rate of addiction was no greater than that of draftees who were to go to Vietnam, but never did go because the war had ended.”

Theodore Dalrymple

C-SPAN: Romancing Opiates https://www.c-span.org/video/?191384-1/romancing-opiates (May 30, 2006)

War

“In the welfare state, experience teaches nothing.”

Theodore Dalrymple

A Murderess’s Tale http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_oh_to_be.html (Winter 2005).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“For the sake of democracy, vigorous, civilized debate must replace the law of silence that political correctness has imposed.”

Theodore Dalrymple

How PC Boosts Le Pen.
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Law , Democracy , Silence

“What youth considers liberation, maturity considers tasteless excess.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Discovering LaRochefoucauld http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/19/apr01/laroche.htm (April 2001).
New Criterion (2000 - 2005)

Youth

“Multiculturalism as an official doctrine, complete with enforcing bureaucracies, undermines the rule of law because it seeks to divide people, formalise their cultural differences and enclose them in moral and intellectual ghettoes. As a result, as Bhiku Parekh puts it, ‘The idea of national culture makes little sense.’ But the rule of law requires a common cultural understanding, not merely the means of repression to enforce a legal code. Once that basic cultural understanding is lost, all that remains is repression, effective or ineffective as the case may be, and experienced by many as alien and unjust.”

Theodore Dalrymple

"Why Borders Matter" http://www.spectator.co.uk/2012/09/why-borders-matter/, The Spectator (September 1, 2012).

People , Law , Idea , Understanding

“What is the point of restraint and circumspection, if such stream-of-consciousness vulgarity can win not merely wealth and fame but complete social acceptance?”

Theodore Dalrymple

Uncouth Chic http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 1998).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Wealth

“Education is not a shield against stupidity, much less against brutality. Indeed, one might almost define an intellectual as someone who can witness a massacre and see a principle.”

Theodore Dalrymple

"The Great Hate Debate" https://www.takimag.com/article/the-great-hate-debate, Taki's Magazine (July 13, 2019).

Education , Stupidity

“With carefully nourished resentment, a man can go through his life blaming someone or something else for his failures. This enables him to be a failure and to feel morally superior to the world at the same time.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Source: "Private Clubs and the Sour Pleasures of Resentment" https://www.theepochtimes.com/private-clubs-and-the-sour-pleasures-of-resentment_3956322.html, The Epoch Times (August 19, 2021).

World , Failure , Time , Life

“Humor, fearlessness, seriousness, and honesty: the qualities that are hated with an equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies that are contending for tenure in the humanities departments of our universities.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Migration: Multiculturalism and its Metaphors (2016)

Hate , Universe

“Nothing is easier - or more gratifying - than to apologise for what your ancestors, enemies or political opponents have done or omitted to do. We get the kudos for having apologised, they get the blame for what we apologise for.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Migration: Multiculturalism and its Metaphors (2016)